Modding My Game Boy Advance

My son asked me if I had anything from when I was a kid.

I knew I did. But I also knew I didn't have anything that worked. Last time I turned something on briefly while sorting out storage I couldn't do anything. There were a few things in the loft. A shed load of Pokémon cards in a tin I got from a girl from work for the kids (they're very much in their football card era at the moment, not pokemon). Quite a few comic books. But nothing I could hand him and say "this was mine, now it's yours." Nothing that still worked.

Then I found the Game Boy.

It was in a bag I hadn't opened in years. An original Game Boy Advance. The one with no backlight, the one where you had to sit directly under a lamp or hold it at exactly the right angle to see what was happening. Clear Purple shell. I was surprised at how good the condition was. Not a scratch, not a bump, battery cover still there and the buttons were just as mushy and unresponsive as they were out of the factory.

I put batteries in it and turned it on.

Nothing.

Well, not nothing. The screen did nothing. Gutted. But the power light came on? Was it just a dead cartridge battery? I turned up the volume, I can't remember why, I think I just had my diagnostic hat on. And then there it was, the boot sound, then I could hear it, Bomberman's theme tune. It wasn't dead after all. Just a little insignificant part of the console wasn't working, the screen. The ribbon cable between the two halves of the clamshell had given up. Twenty years of sitting in a box and the one bit that connects the brain to the face had just... gone. Typical. The one fragile part in an otherwise bombproof piece of kit.

I could have chucked it. Most people would have. It's a broken Game Boy. You can buy a working one for not much money. You can emulate everything on your phone for free.

But that's not the point, is it? The point is this one was mine. I played Pokémon Blue on this after my Game Boy Colour. I played it under the streetlights in the back of the car on the way home from my cousin's house because the screen was that bad. I tried to take it apart when I was a kid just to see what was inside, which, as a naive child, I didn't know was a thing — tri-wing screws, who knew? This specific one, with these specific scratches, was mine.

So I decided to fix it. And then I decided to do more than fix it.

The modding scene for the Game Boy Advance is massive. I had no idea. There are entire communities dedicated to taking these things apart and putting them back together better than Nintendo ever did. New IPS screens with backlighting. New shells in colours Nintendo never made. USB-C charging so you don't need to hunt for AA batteries. Glass lenses. Custom buttons. The lot.

I went down the rabbit hole. Hard.

Here's what I ended up with.

A Retrosix IPS screen kit. This is the big one. The original GBA screen is reflective, meaning it has no light of its own and relies on ambient light hitting it. If you've ever played one, you know the pain. The Retrosix kit gives you a bright, crisp, backlit IPS display. It is genuinely transformative. You go from squinting at a murky screen to seeing these games like you've never seen them before. Crisp pixels. Proper colour. Actually playable in the dark, which the original physically could not do.

A new shell. I went with a yellow and black one because if you're going to open up a Game Boy, you might as well jazz it up with a new case. I remember seeing all the different coloured devices when I was younger and always had FOMO (fear of missing out) on colour combinations I didn't have.

USB-C charging. Because I'm not buying AA batteries in 2026. A rechargeable battery with USB-C means I can charge it from the same cable I use for everything else. Simple. Practical. No brainer.

A new lens, new buttons, new pads. The OEM d-pad and buttons get gummy after two decades. Fresh rubber, fresh click. It feels like a new console that happens to have twenty year old bones.

And here's the thing that surprised me. The actual modding process was the best bit.

Taking it apart was like reverse engineering my own childhood. I recognised pieces I'd seen when I was ten, peering inside the battery compartment wondering what all the little gold pins did. Now I had a screwdriver and a YouTube tutorial and I was actually doing it. Disconnecting the old screen. Carefully threading the new ribbon cable through. Testing the IPS panel for the first time and seeing the Game Boy Advance boot screen lit up properly for the first time in this console's life.

That moment. That's the mint moment. That's what this whole thing is about.

It's not about having a modded Game Boy. You can buy one already done on eBay. It's about the process of taking something that was dead and making it work again. Better than it worked before. With your own hands. Understanding how it works as you go. Making choices about what to replace and what to keep.

I kept the original board. I kept the original cartridge slot. The CPU, the RAM, the actual game playing bits are all original. What I replaced was the stuff that was broken or obsolete. The screen, the power system, the shell, the buttons. The infrastructure around the thing that makes it usable in 2026. The soul of it is still a Game Boy Advance from 2001.

And now my boys can play Pokémon on it. The same one I played Pokémon on. Except he can actually see the screen.

He asked me if I had anything from when I was a kid. Now I do. And so does he.

That's mint, that.